RS: Exactly. Talking about making things your own, I've got to ask you about some of your other projects you've done over the years. First of all, with the Hed Boys. When I was just starting out as a DJ, I first heard that record and I went wild over it.
Dave Lee: All right.

RS: Where did the Hed Boys name come from?
Dave Lee: I can't remember. A Head Boy is in England is like the prefects at school.

You've got the Head Boy and the Head Girl. If you're at the top class or the teacher's favorite, you'll become the Head Boy, who's in between a teacher and a normal pupil. And it changes every year. When he leaves they'll elect a new Head Boy. Not really elect--it depends how it's voted for. So that's where the name Head Boy came from, only we dropped the A.

It was a scam, that record. It was around at the time when there was a lot of stuff on that label, Cleveland City, and X-Press 2 were sort of blowing up, and we did that track in some spare studio time. There was me and another guy called Andrew Livingston I did a lot of stuff with back then. We used to make the more sort of soulful garage-y stuff, but we always used to do the odd thing more than that. When I DJ'd, I heard the X-Press 2 and the Cleveland City stuff a lot in clubs, and I thought I wouldn't mind having a go at something like that. I had that sample, "the girls and boys are dancing on the floor," from a really old house record, and I thought that would be the right sort of sample for one of those tracks.

So we had some studio downtime and we put it out as the Hed Boys because we didn't want anyone to know who it was. We also made up the label, Seka Records, which was named after this Swedish porn star.

RS: (laughs) I knew it!
Dave Lee: We put it out and we didn't tell anybody. I had a mate deliver it to the distributors and we just put our fax number on the record. It ended up blowing up, and we even signed it to a major label, Deconstruction, in the UK, and they still didn't know it was us. My friend Andrew, who they'd never met, went along for the meetings wearing a wig and we had some false photos done, and we got away with it for quite a long time. The record had been out a couple of weeks before somebody in a magazine who knew me recognized the fax number and that's how it got blown. It was good fun because the record did whatever it did under its own merit, and I think sometimes you need to reinvent yourself, especially in dance music in the UK. People write you off after a certain amount of time and they think they know what your stuff is like and don't want to listen to it. It's fun when people think they've found something new or a new exciting producer. When Andrew went to the meetings, the guy said, "Oh, this stuff you're doing sounds really fresh," and it was bollocks because we'd been around for seven or eight years at that point. They thought they'd found some new production team. So... it was cool!

RS: Talking about changing names, the Raven Maize project--was that meant to be more like a rock/pop-oriented project?
Dave Lee: No, the first Raven Maize record came out on an American label called Quark, that was a cut up of Exodus's "Together Forever" in 1989. But the second one was twelve years later which was "The Real Life." That was a medley of Simple Minds and Queen. Freddy Bastone, an American DJ, had done the same combination around the time I did the first Raven Maize in 1989, and I always thought it was a great idea, I always loved that Simple Minds record, "Theme for Great Cities," and the Queen accapellas worked really well over the top of it. I spoke to him and asked if he'd mind if I did a new version of his idea, and it did pretty well, so I did the follow-up, "Fascinated." It was more commercial and more--I don't know if rocky's the right word, but it's got white rocky core progressions in it.

But it's just nice doing different stuff. I like making the pure disco garage-y stuff, and I also enjoy making something a bit more banging and peak time and big room sounding now and then. At the same I like trying something non-housey. It makes it more interesting than if you're doing the same sort of stuff week in, week out. That would get a bit boring, or it would for me. So yeah, I've done a new Raven Maize recently which isn't completely finished. It's a little bit Daft Punk-y but also a little bit rocky, I guess.

RS: Do you have a title for that new Raven Maize?
Dave Lee: Yeah, it's called "In Your Mind."