Ram raider
Armed with a Mac and an insatiable desire to create music, the unsigned Mark Wilkinson was a man on a mission…
: How did you get noticed? MW: “I was getting a little bit handy at Logic, and I was able to make things sound quite good. I was EQing everything way too much back then – I thought that you had to take every resonant frequency out, so I was making a really clean sound. I met a couple of producers in my local area who wanted some help. They did The Herbaliser, a hiphop crew, and they were producing for other people. I got involved in doing some work for them and found a studio next to theirs, which I moved into.”
: Yes, your studio is next door to that of previous Producer Masterclass subject Jonathan Stanley AKA Cyantific. MW: “Cyantific was the best friend of my best friend’s brother. I was a bit younger, and I was always asking him what it was like be a DnB producer. It’s like a magical world, and it really inspired me. I’d go round to his house and he’d have all this money stuffed into a drawer because he’s a DJ. I liked that!
“My mum said, ‘If you want to do it all the time, you’ve got make some money out of it’. I didn’t have any qualifications and I was working too much being a gardener and not being creative enough, so I was like, ‘Right, I’ve got to get a record deal or something’. The studio that I managed to get had another room, which Jon took. It was good being around him a lot. He played a couple of my tunes to Hospital, and they ended up signing a tune called Hypnosis in 2010, which came out on Sick Music 2. When you get an opportunity like that and have a tune out on vinyl, it’s very exciting. I’d been pushed away a lot, sending my tunes to different people, and they’d say, ‘Ah, they’re not really good enough… they’re alright’. But there were a few people, like TC, who helped and encouraged me. That really did make me keep at it.
“Hospital didn’t really like any of the other tunes that I sent, so I just carried on making music. I’d quit my job for a bit and I was just bumming around, making tunes in my pyjamas. My mum was like, ‘You’re living with us; if you’re not signed by the time you’re 21, you’ve got to put it on the back burner’. So, probably, like, two weeks before my birthday, Andy C gave me a shout because he’d heard my tunes. He was like, ‘Yeah geeze! Love the tunes, geeze!’ I had loads of different music, probably about 30 tunes. I went to this meeting with them in Essex on a train. I thought was I going to get, like, a single on Frequency, which was the sister label of Ram at a time. I was like, ‘This is absolutely fucking mental!’ I went into the office and they said, ‘We love everything that you’ve done, we think it’s got loads of potential. We’re not sure there’s anything here yet that we want to sign and put out, but we want to sign you exclusively for a few albums’. I thought, ‘What the f**k? This is mental!’ Andy said, ‘You can do it, you’ve got all the music there – can you make the stuff that we want you to?’ I was like, ‘Fucking hell, man, definitely’. So I went away, literally buzzing, and said to myself, ‘OK, I’m gonna make a tune that Andy’s going to play in a club, and it’s going to get a rewind. So I wrote Moonwalker – I just instantly wrote that, which was wicked. There were people trying to get the tune and people saying they liked the tune on the internet, and it all felt really positive. I understood what I needed to make, and I got what I was meant to do.”
: What was it about your tunes that had to be changed, then? MW: “It was the production level. They played me Bad Red by Culture Shock and said, ‘Our production level has to be up here as a label’. I was like, ‘I get that, and I want to do that’. I love seeing Andy’s sets with rewinds and him dropping something really hard, but I’d never tried to make those sort of tunes.”
“They played me Bad Red and said, ‘Our production level has to be up here as a label’”
: It must have been quite intimidating having them want to sign you but not until your tunes sound like the sickest productions in the game… MW: “It wasn’t like that – I always used to think that I could do anything! Apart from get better grades, obviously.”