Grant Nelson

Nelson is heralded as the Godfather of UK Garage due to his numerous club hits on his Nice 'n' Ripe label in the early 90's. It was his sound along with a few others that gave birth to the then known as 'Sunday Scene' which went on to become UK Garage...

From a very early age he showed more than an interest in music but oddly enough it wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. He was always the class joker and overall entertainer through his school years and it was maybe his love of cinema that convinced him to become an actor. To this date, he swears that if things hadn’t unfolded the way that they did he would have gone to R.A.D.A and who knows, maybe we would be watching him on the silver screen now.

At around the age of 9 he first began dabbling in acoustic engineering – oh okay, pulling his parents hi-fi system apart and recording the results onto his granddads old reel to reel cassette recorder. He claims that he was a mix DJ before the term had even been invented. “I used to take a bit of Queen’s ‘Another one bites the dust’, throw in some beats from some dodgy old Hawaiian drums LP and, very poorly, scratch in orchestral hits from my ‘Star Wars’ original motion picture Soundtrack album. The result was nearly always terrible but it was the fact that you could make something different by layering pieces of music that first drew my attention to the intricate workings of music production”.

After blagging his way into a Djing gig, just because he had bundles of records and bundles of lip, he became quite popular in the local area and ended up doing a few birthday parties and Christmas do’s. This soon became frustrating due to the musical requests though – “They were asking for all sorts of rubbish and although I admit that I bought some pants records in my youth, I was 16 now and had a devastating collection of 70’s disco, 80’s soul and early house…. I was being asked for ‘Congratulations’ by Cliff Richard. It had to stop… It was offending my ears….” So Grant teamed up with a friend to ‘put on a few parties’.