Matt Darey has been one of the pioneers of trance since its early beginnings in 1994 with the release of his first (Goah Trance) record “Li Kwan – Point zero” one of Oakenfolds pinnacle tracks. Since then the Matt Darey style has been a major influence on the next generation of trance producers such as Michael Woods (Who was trained by Matt), Above and Beyond, Darren Tate, Neo and Ferina…….etc.
“I started off making music back at School when I hooked up with my friend Jamie White. We formed a live four piece band, I was the singer Jamie played keys and we wrote most of the songs together. Fortunately there are no known surviving copies of the tunes we made!!!!! After a couple of years I went off to do a Degree in Marketing and Jamie went off to live in Australia. It was around 1992 when I started to get into the rave scene in the U.K. There was a budding Drum and bass scene in my home town Leicester…… I got right on board and started to make mad breakbeat tunes. I didn’t really attend my degree classes much over three years. I knew it was just a way to delay getting a real job while I decided what I wanted to do in life. It was only in the last few months of the final year of my Degree that it dawned on me……..shit……Final Exams…..Argggghhhhhhh!!!!! Each student had to do a final year thesis on a ficticious product. The only way I was gonna pass my Degree was to excel at this so I decided to make a real product and do what I love most……… I called it “The Marketing of a Rave record”. I got a student loan and pressed up a thousand copies of my track “Overdose”. I went round loads of record shops and raves giving out promo’s and selling copies and within two weeks I’d sold the lot. There was a bit of a buzz going on from the copies I’d sold so I convinced a Distributer to stock it, borrowed some more money and pressed and sold another few thousand. I knew that from now on I wanted to make tunes.
About the same the same time Jamie’s Australian visa ran out. He only went over there back packing and landed himself a massive record deal. Even so, the goverment threw him out of the country so it never got off the ground. Within a couple of weeks of him coming back to the U.k we started making tunes again and sent off demo’s to all the rave labels at the time. The day before the BPI awards we set of to London to follow up our demo’s. Just by chance we were sitting in the office of a very small record label playing our demo tape when some big shot from New York’s Sire Records called Seymour Stien (the man who signed Madonna) rang the guy in the office.