Harry Harrison is an entertaining person to chat too. He was one of the founders of the DiY sound system and is an interesting part as he was never a DJ so maybe 'Instigator at DiY' could be a good job title for him (though obviously there were many involved). DiY were a proper sound system. They went from clubs to fields and back into clubs... They were free party people and used the levers (& finances) of playing in clubs, to further their endeavours putting things on for free in spaces that felt at home. Harry has recently put down many of his memories in the book, 'Dreaming In Yellow – The Story of the DiY Sound System'. It's a fun read and we highly recommend it if you've not checked it yet. On with the program...

Paul Test Pressing
So Harry. An easy one to start… Where are you now?

Harry DiY
I live in Aberystwyth in West Wales. I've lived here 14 years in the ass end of nowhere. If you're going to spend anywhere for lockdown here is good. It’s had the lowest COVID rates in the entire UK apart from Shetland Islands apparently.

Paul Test Pressing
Right.

Harry DiY
So yeah. So are you London?

Paul Test Pressing
Yes, SE6. South…

Harry DiY
I just did another interview on, it's mind boggling isn't it, the amount of bloody communication methods these days? So, I've just done one on Google Talk is it called?

Paul Test Pressing
Oh never used it. How did you end up in Aberystwyth?

Harry DiY
God knows. I'm from Bolton. I was then in Nottingham for 13 years. Then I lived in Hackney for a year. I moved to San Francisco in 2000. Lived in San Francisco for seven years. Came back, met a woman in Liverpool, fell in love, moved here, renovated a farm, had two kids and never left. It's lovely to be honest. The city is about a mile away. It's beautiful. It's just very very boring. I kinda need boring really. I needed some boredom after the 90s.

Paul Test Pressing
Maybe you kind of did enough in the first bit….

Harry DiY
I think I did enough for several lives to be honest. Have you read the book, have you got a copy of it?

Paul Test Pressing
I've got it here…..

Harry DiY
What a guy! So you work for Test Pressing is it?

Paul Test Pressing
Yeah, well yeah. That's just it's a kind of labor of love. We all do it because we love it, well, we all do it. I kind of mainly do it with a few other people. I worked in records for years. I was at at Junior Boys Own for like 10 years. I was down there and then I made music and sort of still do.

Harry DiY
Okay, so you know Terry Farley and the Weatheralls and all that lot, well, he's no longer with us, all those lot. I'll tell you a funny story about Boy’s Own. So someone once described DiY in the press as a cross between Crass and Boy’s Own, you know, the original London based rave magazine and party organization, not Boyzone the boy band. So when he printed it, he said that they were crossing Crass and Boyzone with the ‘z’? That's fucking brilliant.

Paul Test Pressing
You know Darren Price? He's a producer and took over Emerson's place in Underworld. Darren Price was part of Boy’s Own. Anyway, if memory serves Pricey had a mate who was in Ireland, who originally was in Boyzone, but he got booted for some reason but I think they took the name from Boy’s Own.

Harry DiY
That was a bad day for him wasn't it?

Paul Test Pressing
Weirdly, the other thing is I worked at is Guerilla Records and we worked with Spiral Tribe / Drum Club which links in to your story….

Harry DiY
I was very good mates with Charlie Hall. He turned up a party we did in the solstice of 1990. He was the sort of acceptable face of Spiral Tribe.

Paul Test Pressing
Well, so when did you get ‘it’?

Harry DiY
We were lucky enough to have had the Hacienda growing up, but it really clicked on the dance floor. We went to an acid house frenzy party at Rock City. Just the name alone is fantastic. They had this party and some people came up from London and I've never heard records be mixed together before in that way. I'd heard electro and heard house Records, but never heard it been mixed together. We did some mushrooms and it just blew our fucking minds. And at the end, we went to the DJ and were like ‘What's this? What's that?’ There was no obviously there's no genres. We've never danced that way before. And we were dancing five hours later. I remember walking home off our faces, but really happily, you know…

It was a Nottingham sort of dawn, quite a beautiful city anyway and I remember just this red sky and thinking, ‘This is it! This is all I ever want to for the rest of my life. And we want everyone to do this. And we want all our friends to do it too.’ And that's what we did the next 10 years.

Paul Test Pressing
DiY were sort of down for that like proper dubby deep house sound. How did that come about?

Harry DiY
Well I have a theory about this. You have this moment when you get it… For me, it was like Italian house around 120 but not faster than 125bpm. That to me is what it was. But I think if you were slightly younger and you'd had your first experience at a free party in Bristol in ’93 to loads of hardcore, then probably that would be your moment and that would be your thing.

I mean initially there weren’t that many records coming out so you got what you found but I think gradually Simon got more and more into American house and he just was obsessed with Strictly Rhythm, Bottom Line all those those labels. Pete from DiY hated the phrase deep house but actually in the end people just called our sound DiY. We had a guy called Jonathon who worked at Arcade Records and he was obsessed and would just buy in this amazing music we’d pick up. He never saw daylight as he was in a basement record shop. He supplied a lot of Simon's music and he was beyond obsessive.

Paul Test Pressing
So jumping about… I was going to ask you who I had the record for staying up the most days in a row.

Harry DiY
Simon. Simon was a legend and a disgrace haha. We were all caners to be honest. Some of us would be up for I'd say probably five or six days at a time. You’d be driving somewhere and realise you were on the hard shoulder of the motorway going about 8 miles an hour. Someone else would takeover. Messy times.

I think after 48 hours the hallucinations start and I remember being somewhere just looking at the floor and I just thought ‘oh look at all these rats’. The whole floor just turned to a complete like river of rats and mice and it wasn’t horrible or anything I just thought ‘oh look at all these rodents’.

But yes, I think I think around the free party scene in particularly, because all the travellers, they were hitting it hard. So they were also you know, not naming names, supplying the parties and they were professional drug takers. They would finish on Tuesday and start again on Thursday. And they were out in the fields. They had no normality. We go back to Nottingham we had flats and houses and beds and stuff but we’d go back to see them three days later and they’d still be at it.

Paul Test Pressing
There was a lot of heroin in that scene eventually no? Was that just because of the sort of hedonistic natural progression if you want.

Harry DiY
Well, it wasn't just the travellers. It was the clubbers as well. I know a lot, including myself and a lot of our lot, got into heroin, because at the end of the day, there aren't that many drugs either. You know you've got cocaine, ecstasy, and then heroin is a no no but unfortunately it is the perfect drug for chilling out on Sunday nights. Heroin, valium, alcohol - exactly the same effects. You’ve been up all weekend and they just take the edge off it and that's a very dangerous thing. But yes, I think it wasn't just travellers. I suspect that the 90s in the UK had probably the highest level of drug consumption in human history. Anyway, I would say much more than the 60s. I think the 60s was kind of confined to London, but I think the 90s was everywhere.

Paul Test Pressing
I mean, it was also a very very creative time. And there was a lot of money to be made. There was also some sort of statistic attached to the fact that tons of student loans got spent on turntables in the 90s which kind of tells you about the prevalence of dance music…

Harry DiY
Yeah, we did that. We started inventing fictitious students… I mean, the words acid house just sum it up the best, don't they? Just that combination. And then young British people's sense of recklessness, and but also bravado, creativity and just inventiveness and absolutely scant regard to the law. It was just fabulous. And I just look back and I do kind of wonder, will that ever happen again?

Paul Test Pressing
I think the bit that you missed as well though you do touch on it on the book is that we also had basically a massive, huge signal and that was the press saying how bad it was. If you read the establishment saying how awful something is the first thing you are going to do is to investigate whatever that is… ‘I’ll have that’….

Harry DiY
Yeah.’11,000 Youngsters go crazy at acid house party’… We had it with Castle Morton. Within 24 hours, the whole world knew there were like 50,000 young people there via the six o'clock news. It's just the most perfect way to get loads and loads of young people somewhere. You have a Chief Inspector fro the police saying, ‘I strongly advise young people are thinking of attending this not to go’. That's gonna work haha. But yeah, the authorities as ever, just didn't have a clue…

Paul Test Pressing
If you look at the 90s there was definitely that period where like everything was colourfull. The world just kind of went Technicolor - the money politics all the sudden felt that it was going in the right direction… Back to the book…. You originally wanted to be a human rights lawyer. Do you sort of look back and kind of wish that you held a little bit more on to the sort of idealistic attitude of what DiY stood for a start and got more involved in the political side of things rather than the hedonistic?

Harry DiY
Yeah, absolutely but we did get involved in things we felt strongly about and raise money to fight say the criminal justice bill. 10s of 1000s of pounds. We produced 100,000 leaflets, subsidised coaches to go to demos and stuff. We were a very equal organisation. Everyone got paid the same. You know, we had a community studio and stuff…

Paul Test Pressing
I went to a DiY party once I think and in my head I sort of like have that fuzzy 7am dancing by a window with the sun in my face sort of picture… That moment when deep house music all makes sense. If you know what I mean…

Harry DiY
That is definitely the moment. When it’s 6 or 7am when things have got a bit more spaced out and that moment is spectacular. You just lose track of time… Time is irrelevant. You don't even know where you are. You know what time it is you your mates, male, female, whatever. And everyone's just fucking having a laugh. Everyone's just blissed out. And you can dance, you can not dance. You can chat. You can drink or not drink and you can do a line and not do a lot. Yeah. I'm getting euphoric thinking about it…

Paul Test Pressing
Okay, so let's start rounding this off. What I love in the story that I find one of the most DiY things is when you took the office at the Square Centre and they said ‘it comes with a cleaner’ but you invited her in and said basically you can come in and smoke fags but you’re not allowed to clean. It says a lot about your ethos. What do you think is the most DiY thing in the book?

Harry DiY

Oh fuck… I think it’s the story in the book about when we were pissed off with going to Glastonbury so a load of us drove 16 hours to the north of Scotland and has a party up there at this tiny hippie community. We loaded the whole sound system and went over to this little island. We'd had enough of big events. We're gonna go to this ridiculously small island and make an amazing amount of effort and drive all the way there… It’s so far up it’s near Norway. I mean it's just brilliant… It's like why would you do that? Hahah.

'Dreaming In Yellow – The Story of the DiY Sound System' is available now on Velocity Press. Get it HERE.