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A Guy Called Gerald has been at the forefront of dance music from the beginning. He chats to a guy called Colin Carlisle about his secret technologies

Coming out of The Hit Squad and 808 State, Gerald Simpson's first solo release 'Voodoo Ray' in 1989 shocked everyone with the effectiveness of the sampler. He took a simple female vocal hook, the words "voodoo ray" and a devastating house beat. Sculpting them until they were completely his own.

He got to number 12 in the British charts and the notoriety brought him under fire from the rock traditionalists. "I got so much stick from live musicians saying, 'You're killing music doing this' that I thought, 'Oh well, I'll retaliate, I'll hate all live music and do my own stuff.' I like using live instruments - but sampling them and totally distorting them."

I met A Guy Called Gerald at a Thames side cafe, round the corner from his DIY multimedia studio-cum-bedroom. He's a relaxed man who enjoys simple pleasures; sunshine, fresh fruit, the view of the river, and the absence of guns in the area.

His aversion to live music has mellowed. A planned tour this autumn will include singers and players, but the drum and bass will remain strictly electronic. He just wishes there were such things as brain plugs so he could hook his musicians up together. Gerald's hatred has moved on to the house he helped to build, though it's more a frustration that others can't progress and change at his frenetic pace. In the last few years he has manoeuvred beyond hardcore drum and bass - the gangster jungle sound.

He's completely outpaced house and techno beats and as for his early pioneering work 'Voodoo Ray': "To tell you the truth I can't stand the track. Seriously! It was cool in them days, but now it's over, it's old. Eighties. This is the nineties, looking toward the year 2000. For me that's where it all starts. There's going to be some pure shit going on."

But whilst waiting for the new millenium, and under pressure from the industry, A Guy Called Gerald has remixed his old classic. Out went almost everything. The words "voodoo ray" are now a jarring stretch that distorts into "voodoo rage", but the vocal hook hangs like a ghost in the junglist's machine. It has neither changed over time, as Gerald has, nor has it changed in time, while his other samples warp, stretch and reverse.

Gerald did not relish the task of a remix. "All the way through from 1988 until now , every time I've gone near the track it's been trouble for me. Getting ripped off, record companies going bust, managers disappearing with money. And now they want it to go out again, so I said: 'Take it, do what you want with it, but on your head be it because I think that record's cursed. So I called it 'The Curse of Voodoo Ray'."

Gerald does not seem jinxed. We've just seen the release of the 4 Hero remixes of 'Finley's Rainbow' on his own Juice Box Records, as well as his remix of Flora Purim's 'What You See' on B&W. Not an easy project given his respect for both her and her husband Airto. "I think one of the first records I got was Joe Sample's LP Burning up the Carnival. Looking on the back sleeve, I saw the vocalist was Flora Purim. I found a few of her records, and the percussionist was Airto Moreira. From there, I got totally hooked on Chick Corea's music. I'd just go down to the local library and steal records."

Stealing sounds by this method was short-lived. He moved on to intellectual robbery, such as looping Herbie Hancock's 'Rocket' in the mid Eighties. By the Nineties, Gerald was deep in the lawless terrain of jungle, where theft is as fast as the beats.

"I started off doing the really hardcore stuff, out of the rave thing. I did a tune called '28 Gun Badboy' and did these mad snare drums on it. I kept hearing it on all these different tracks, so I started sampling bits and pieces from other people. With the Hardcore style it got really repetitive. Not as in the music, but you'd do something and it would get sampled, torn apart and used and used and used."

'24 Gun Bad Boy' became the title track of jungle's first solo album, and last February's album Black Secret Technology was the first major jazz jungle infusion. Strangely titled, because he never once mentioned ethnicity in the interview, but was keen to give away the tricks of his trade.

In the sleeve notes he talks of the secret rhythms of nature. "I believe that some of these trance like rhythms reflect my frustration with trying to find out the Truth about my ancestors who talked with drums."

Yet his method of recapturing these beats seems quite perverse - always forward looking, never back. He uses denatured technology to pattern beats too fast and precise for the human hand. But it works. In and out of his tracks African polyrhythms swirl. I asked him where they came from.

"Africa! ha ha. No. It's all subliminal innit? Taking breakbeats from old funk drumming and changing them round and making them sound more African, which isn't hard to do, strangely enough. And just adding different textures to them. Putting heavier bass lines with them or heavier drums. It feels like the most natural thing to dance to. Whatever rocks me, I'll use."

For me, it's new ways of writing; new sounds, new textures in the sound, the movement of what's in it. Perhaps in a couple of years, they'll pick up on what I'm doing now and say 'Yeah that's really cool - do it again!' Fuck off!"

I asked him about the future. He intends to hook up with a Cuban he met in Paris and make Salsa. Whatever comes of it, A Guy Called Gerald will be the first to move on to the next phase.