Mark Doyle from hed kandi - How Can You Enjoy Music If You Don't Dance-

As the man behind Jazz FM's acclaimed hed kandi compilation series, Mark Doyle occupies an envious position. Through his radio show he showcases the series' selection of house, retro anthems, and chillout compilations, while his high profile status maintains a club DJ career that takes him from Ibiza to Australia to Middlesborough. As chief selector and ideas man behind ked kandi and new sister label Stereo Sushi, he's also constantly courted and feted by labels seeking licensing deals, and is one of London's key tastemakers in what music makes it out of the clubs.

However, 10 years ago in 1991, disillusioned and fed-up, he'd virtually quit house music, giving up promotion and credible club DJing in favour of Ritzy discos and a job in a pet shop. That he'd already help launch the careers of Brandon Block, X Press 2 and many of the Junior Boys Own DJs, meant nothing as he'd already lost "a fortune" as big business started taking over England's club culture.

"When we started it had all just happened, we didn't have a clue about marketing or flyers or anything like that. It stopped appealing to me, I just wanted to turn up and play records," he told Skrufff's Jonty Adderley.


Skrufff: Why have you set up yet another label alongside hed kandi-

hed handi (Mark Doyle): "Hed kandi has become such a recognisable, high profile brand in the last year and we found we had more music than we could release. There's so much good music that's ignored; on the one hand you've got the very trendy compilations and at the other, the very commercial ones, with all this stuff in between that often doesn't make it onto CD. If you're an avid 12" vinyl buyer you'll own them, but lots of other people who like the songs, don't. We put out about 8 Hed Kandi compilations last year and we didn't want to get a fatigue factor."

Skrufff: Ministry sell hundreds of thousands of units, what are you typical sales figures-

hed kandi: "In the UK we usually do around 20,000 plus 30,000 on export. It's great what Ministry do but you do have to compromise for the mass market. We're making a reasonable sum of money and the bosses are reasonably happy. We're much more a word of mouth brand instead of spending loads on marketing with huge advertising campaigns. Some of these big labels will be spending up to £3 (US$4.50) a unit on marketing whereas we consider ourselves to be splashing out if we spend 50p."

Skrufff: I understand you got turned onto raving one night at Nicky Holloway's infamous Sin night at the Astoria (1988); did you go just as a raver-

hed kandi: "I didn't used to go to the London clubs because I'd fallen into doing a lot of commercial clubs and I wasn't a part of the rave scene at the time. We'd taken over a bar and were playing a Thursday night at what was really an office party type thing, playing a vast array of commercial music. I got tickets to Sin (The Astoria's legendary rave club) one night, walked in and had one of those cliched house spiritual awakening moments. We were already running another club night and I literally went out and educated myself musically by spending vast sums of money on new records. I went to City Sounds and bought everything, then took them to my club and tried them all out.

It wasn't a chemical thing at Sin, though, I remember walking in as Pete Tong was playing the acapella of Back To Life; I looked around, saw the reaction, the crowd, the setting and thought, 'Yes'."

Skrufff: You walked away from club promotion in the early 90s, what put you off-

hed kandi: "Losing vast sums of money. We had a glory period up until about 1991 then as soon as it got very big, the scene became very London-centric. It was no longer about the suburban clubs, it was either central London clubs or big raves and you started competing with everybody else, on factors like who was DJing and how big was the sound system. It became harder to do a nice little club that was just a laugh. When we started it had al Tags

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