Timex , RVB, Siege. Candles Cafe 2009

A really old friend of mine from a good twenty years back, Thomas Bullock, is in LA this week, playing a party on Saturday night in his current musical incarnation, Rub 'N' Tug. He also makes music in a project called Map Of Africa, with Harvey, who I'd seen in Venice a couple of times since being here, and had told me Thomas was on his way. Harvey's a world famous DJ now but was another old face from the exact same era and crew as Tom. An era when I had bunked out of my bedroom window to go to the warehouse parties they did, and stood behind crowds as the Police shut the party down with riot gear.

This will sound like one of those nauseating 'good old days' stories, but it's easy to forget I was there, I was priviledged to be so, and people like Thomas and Harvey can back it. And easy to forget how unique the birth of the warehouse party was, so much has evolved since then. This was really early, I mean '86, when those guys were really the first people doing it, the idea was totally new, as fresh as the first painted wholecar. I'm proud I lived through that, as well as proud of being a first generation UK hip hop kid and having that as a lifestyle to live by. I grew up and participated in an explosion of creativity that sometimes it's hard to imagine can ever happen again.

We were able to annexe our conversation from the rest of the table for a little bit and chew the fat over names pulled from out of the fogs of time. Names from the club and graffiti scenes of the late 80s - Devil 666, Robbo, Sham59, Rev, Rob & Elisa, the Tonka lot. All pieces of a very precious time slice in all three of our lives, and from the perspective of all three of us sitting in a bar in Venice, a time that has influenced all three profoundly, but in varied ways.

I was grinning from ear to ear when Thomas told a story about being in a millionaire's rainforest hideway in Bali, an architect-designed stunner made of granite boulders and live tree trunks, plumb spang in the middle of the jungle, going for a pony in the guy's toilet, and finding a graffiti magazine, with a six page article on my work. Always a good way to get introduced to a group of cool LA music people, that one.