Down Memory Lane With… Leigh Devlin

Minus Blue aka Leigh Devlins’ music career began with the explosion of house music and dance culture in the late eighties and early nineties. In 2009, Leigh put together an album under the name of ‘Minus Blue’. The sound is best described as a collection of Leighs’ influences and so with that in mind we asked Leigh to look back on his illustrious career and pick out 5 memories that have helped define him both as the man and the artist he is today.

My First Musical Love

My first love was New Order. I grew up in Sheffield in the eighties and got into dance music by listening to New Order albums, 12″s and remixes. It was their change from being indie gods to dancefloor pioneers that pulled me into electro and house music. They really paved the way for a lot of the music that came along later in the decade. I really remember hearing the first few house tracks coming out of Chicago and thinking, something is changing here! The late eighties was such a fantastic time for music, the crossover between house and indie was kind of electrifying – the Stone Roses and the Manchester scene in general was really special.

Living the Acid House Scene

I was really lucky that the Hacienda was just over the Pennines from Sheffield, and other great clubs in the North of England were nearby too – Shelly’s in Stoke and Venus in Nottingham. It was listening to great DJs like Sasha and Graeme Park that drew me further into the scene, and when DJs started making their own music instead of playing tracks from American and Italian producers, I started thinking I can do this too.

I’d been DJing for a while when a good friend opened a record shop in Sheffield, Cush-D Records, and gave me a job – if you can call playing records a job! A typical weekend would be DJing on Friday, round to a friend’s house to DJ (one night Dave Seaman turned up for a mix), then going straight to the shop on Saturday morning and continuing the party there until it was time to go to the next club. It was a crazy time of life. That’s where I cut my teeth, listening to house from all around the world and DJIng in Sheffield and around the North of England.

Living the Amsterdam Life

The first wave of the house scene was winding down a little, say after Renaissance had lost its magic around ’94, so I decided it was time to move on, and moved to Amsterdam. It was an attempt to carry on the party; the Dutch House scene was really buoyant at that time and the party did indeed carry on! I still bump into people who saw me in Amsterdam at that time and I have no recollection at all! I remember DJing at bars at the time when all the Brit-pop stuff was starting to come through and thinking it might be time to go home and check out what was going on. I still love Amsterdam though and would love to live there again in the future.

Kenwood Studios

I made enough money DJing in Amsterdam to buy myself a studio setup and moved back to England in ‘96. I locked myself in a room for a couple of years and figured out how to use all this incredibly complicated equipment, and decided I might need some help!  I went to study at Red Tape Studios and was taught by a now great friend, Simon Atkinson… a great engineer. Also studying at Red Tape was an old friend from the clubbing days, Simon Harrison, who was setting up a studio in Sheffield. I became involved, along with Adam Dowding – another great friend – and we opened the studio as Kenwood Studios in 1999.

Our biggest job at Kenwood was working on Dizzee Rascals’ ‘Boy In Da Corner’ LP – which went on to win the Mercury Music Prize. Dizzee had been having some trouble at the time, I seem to remember he had just been stabbed, and wanted to get away from London and its distractions to finish the LP. It actually turned out that half of London seemed to be driving up the M1 every day to be in the studio with him!

To be honest, Kenwood was probably known for the parties that went on just as much as the music it produced. It was a residential studio that offered rooms to travelling DJs which meant that on any given weekend of the year, we would have the likes of the Hed Kandi guys, Meat Katie, Adam Freeland and James Zabiela playing at our own semi-private parties.  As an aside, one of the trainee engineers we had at that time was a young lad called Tom Bell. You may know him better as Toddla T…

Giving Birth to MinusBlue

At the same time as working at Kenwood, I returned to Red Tape Studios to run a course in production. This is where I met Emma Saville, a young singer, and started writing the first tracks that went on to become the first MinusBlue album.  The first album was written over a period of four or five years while I worked on various projects and changed jobs to become a tutor at Sheffield College of Music – yet another place that was known more for its party attitude than its academic excellence!

The first MinusBlue album was released in 2009. It was all over the net and went on to sign tracks to a couple of hundred compilations – especially ‘Be As One’, but the label I signed the album to was hopeless, which is why the name MinusBlue is still relatively unknown!

The new album was written in a very short space of time compared to the first, perhaps a year from start to finish. I think it’s a much more focused album. The songs are strong and the new singers I’ve brought in to augment Emma Saville have done a great job. I’ve signed the LP to Seamless Recordings who are doing a great job of getting the music out there, so here’s to a great Summer 2013!

MinusBlue’s second album Living Life In Phases is out now on Seamless Recordings.