The Story of A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray”

Given how familiar “Voodoo Ray” now feels, it’s difficult to imagine a time when it was shockingly fresh. Yet when copies of the first white label edition of A Guy Called Gerald’s debut EP started appearing in iconic Manchester record store Spin Inn in the summer of 1988, it ignited the interest of customers in a way that few records had done before.

For starters, it was the work of a regular customer, Gerald Simpson. While Simpson had yet to make his mark as a producer, he was well known locally. He’d been a constant presence on Manchester’s dancefloors since the early 1980s, busting moves alongside other keen jazz dancers and breakdancers. Thanks to the vibrancy of the soul “all-dayer” scene and the popularity of organised dance battles, he was also familiar to a swathe of DJs and dancers across the north of England.

From the moment those white label copies began to appear in Spin Inn, “Voodoo Ray” took on a life of its own. The EP’s mesmerising title track quickly became a firm favourite in clubs on both sides of the Pennines, and by the summer of 1989, it was a ubiquitous anthem throughout the UK. It even gatecrashed the singles chart, selling by the bucketload.

There’s no denying that it was, and remains, a very special record. While some of its distinctive elements were undoubtedly influenced by pioneering records from Chicago and Detroit, it stood apart from what had come before. It could be argued that “Voodoo Ray” marked a watershed moment in the history of British dance music. Never before had a UK house or techno producer been able to create something so devilishly different. In its wake came a string of uniquely British sounding records, many made by those who knew Gerald Simpson, or had encountered him at dance battles across the north.

What follows is the story of that iconic record, told by those who made it, played it and used it as inspiration to create pioneering tracks of their own. It contains excerpts from a vintage interview with Gerald by DJHistory.com founders Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, alongside contributors from co-producers Aniff Akinola and Colin Thorpe, Jive Turkey resident DJs DJ Parrot and Winston Hazel, and the original Nightmares on Wax line-up of George “E.A.S.E” Evelyn and Kevin “Boy Wonder” Harper.

GERALD SIMPSON

I was totally into jazz, jazz funk in the early days. The Jazz Defectors were big time for us, but there were all these other dance crews, and we used to follow them around. You’d go out, and those kinds of guys would be there dancing. There would be loads of other people, loads of other things going on.

ANIFF AKINOLA

I think one of the reasons that acid house was first palatable to serious dancers like Gerald was that the quirkiness of the timing wasn’t a problem for those who lived on jazz and electro. You basically had the jazz dance scene at Berlin [in Manchester], from 1981-82 through until about 1985. Gerald would go there.

GEORGE “E.A.S.E” EVELYN

I remember going to the funk and soul all-dayers that used to happen at places like Rock City in Nottingham. You’d have dance crews from all over the north of England there. I remember hearing Adonis’ “No Way Back” and thinking, “What the fuck is this?” To us, it was like some mutant form of electro or funk. You could body pop to it, you could fusion to it. You could footstep to it, battle to it. All through that period of time from 1984 until the end of 1987, beginning of 1988, the word “house music” never came into it. They were just club tracks... dance tracks.

DJ PARROT

House was just another step on from electro and everything else – a new dance that came in. A new style, a new sound. People would say, “That’s what we do now, we do that.”

ANIFF AKINOLA

A different generation of steppers really took to it, Foot Patrol being the best example in Manchester.

FROM DANCER TO PRODUCER

GERALD SIMPSON

I didn’t have much money in those days. I was collecting as many dance moves as I was equipment or records, when I could get to the records. Eventually I got a job as a carpet fitter, and then working in McDonald’s. Then I could start to put down money to buy equipment from A1 Music and Johnny Roadhouse. I never thought I’d make a living out of it. I just had this creative drive to make [electronic] music.

COLIN THORPE

There weren’t many of us at that time who were into machines. Gerald was really into machines. I remember that the first time we visited him at his mum’s house, he had all his Roland machines – TR-808, SH-101, TB-303 – laid out on this pasting table, like you’d use for decorating.

GERALD SIMPSON

When I started getting equipment I was going down the electro route. When I started hearing acid house, I was already familiar with the sound of the 808 and the 303. The first time I heard an acid track, it was on the radio. I was like, “Oh my God, they’re using the same bass machine that I have,” but they were totally tweaking it out.

ANIFF AKINOLA

In those days I listened to a lot of radio. People like Mike Shaft and Stu Allan, who took over the slot Mike used to have, would play a lot of acid house.

GERALD SIMPSON

I started recording these tapes of live acid jams. I’d take them into Spin Inn on cassettes, just to let them hear it. I was dying for people to hear my stuff. Piccadilly Radio used to have this demo show, I think on a Sunday with Stu Allan. He’d always play local demos.

ANIFF AKINOLA

One day I was listening to Stu’s show and heard him play this demo by someone who called himself Housemaster G. It was a “what the hell is this” moment. I got on my bike, rode down to Piccadilly Radio, knocked on the door and Stu was still there. He gave me the tape, and luckily there was a number on it. So I followed it up and got through to Gerald. I then told Colin I was going to meet this kid at his mum’s house in Moss Side.

COLIN THORPE

We’d been working together in the studio for a couple of years, initially as Chapter, and then as Chapter And The Verse. Aniff knew these two lads that ran this indie label over Liverpool way called Skysaw. They were really into hip-hop and wanted to set up a new offshoot label called Rham! Records. Because we were so interested in Mantronix, we wanted to make electro tunes – electronic soul was our thing. “Hard bottom, soft top” is what we called it – crunching bottom end, and then sweetness at the top. The guys from Skysaw went along with it and let us do the A&R. Then Gerald came along.

ANIFF AKINOLA

The second time I went round Gerald’s house, he gave me a tape with four or five demos on there. We told him that we wanted to bring him into the studio, and would let him decide what tracks he wanted to make. The moment we heard the “Voodoo Ray” demo, we knew that had to be one of them.

INTO THE STUDIO

COLIN THORPE

All four tracks from the EP were done in a two-day period at Moonraker Studios in Manchester. It was all in downtime.

ANIFF AKINOLA

That kind of after-hours recording was very common at the time. The studio we used was owned by [comedian and folk singer] Mike Harding. During the day it would be set up for folk recordings, but during the night we got in and made house.

COLIN THORPE

We could basically get in there when Lee [Monteverde], the engineer, didn’t have anything else to do. That made it incredibly cheap to produce. I think it cost about £75 to record the entire EP.

GERALD SIMPSON

“Voodoo Ray” started off just as a demo. I’d already laid out the bassline and also the drumbeat. Then I worked the 303 in when we were in the studio.

GERALD SIMPSON

On the day we got into the studio, I was really excited and overwhelmed. I think I had some records with me. They had this sampler in there – I’d seen an older version of this sampler before but I’d never seen this new one. Anyway, I asked if I could put some stuff into the sampler and try it out. It was the first 16-track studio I’d been in, so I was just laying loads of stuff down.

COLIN THORPE

He found this vocal sample from a Pete and Dud record that said “Voodoo Rage,” which sounded pretty cool so we sampled that up. We had two samplers, and neither me nor Lee the engineer really knew how the bloody things worked. Lee chopped off the end of “rage” by mistake, and it became “Voodoo Ray.” We thought: actually, that sounds even cooler. The whole record is a series of experiments. You know: “Ooh, how does that work?”

GERALD SIMPSON

At the same time as I was making the acid stuff, I’d been doing this S.O.S Band, street soul type stuff with [vocalist] Nicola Collier. I also had this demo of a track I’d made with her, so she was down the studio with us when we were doing “Voodoo Ray.” I remember asking whether we could try getting Nicola to sing over the top.

ANIFF AKINOLA

Nicola really didn’t like house – she wanted to be a soul singer. We weren’t getting anything out of her. I went off to the toilet and started thinking about what we could get her to do. The big singer at the time was Boy George, so I tried to think of what he might do. Then it hit me: “Oooh, ooh-ooh, aah-aah yeah!” I went back in the studio and shouted it to Nicola.

GERALD SIMPSON

We spun one sequence of her vocals into the sampler and I remember putting the reverse thing on – I think I did that on everything actually because it was like the new tool. I remember in the meanwhile the vocal was playing, playing it back with the reverse and thinking, “Wow, shit! That sounds wild!”

COLIN THORPE

None of us knew how to program the S-950 [sampler], so Gerald sat there pressing the reverse button all the way through it, which is where the stab pattern comes from. To begin with, Gerald didn’t like the vocal.

GERALD SIMPSON

It was a good idea in the end, it made the track less mechanical and kept this really weird flow. The actual tone of her singing forwards and backwards at the same time created this weird, kind of hypnotic feeling. People were thinking it was some kind of Asian thing at first, because it was almost like some kind of mantra, but it was just her singing backwards and forwards. Not even lyrics but just the same thing.

ANIFF AKINOLA

It just sounded brilliant.

SAMPLE MAGIC

COLIN THORPE

We had to put everything on tape. Gerald would run all of the machines simultaneously for six minutes or something like that. The samples were all played across the top of that manually. Lee then set the mix up – put the delay effects on, balanced it and so on.

GERALD SIMPSON

There was a bank full of effects we could use. Lee, the engineer, was really my first teacher in the studio. I could ask for effects and he would patch them in how I wanted.

COLIN THORPE

Lee was a big fan of Shep Pettibone and the Pet Shop Boys. He wanted to get this clean, polished, modern, digital sound. The resulting record is his go at that, against Gerald’s analogue approach.

GERALD SIMPSON

I’d be left alone for periods to have a go at mixing it, and bouncing different things down.

COLIN THORPE

I remember at one point Aniff and I went outside and kicked a football around in the car park. Gerald came out 45 minutes later, and they’d done six versions of “Voodoo Ray.” He’d just sit there and mute things in and out. He structured it from the beginning.

GERALD SIMPSON

I knew nothing about counting bars. I was just working it out in the studio.

ANIFF AKINOLA

It was all mixed live, in real time. You’d have six hands over the desk.

COLIN THORPE

Somebody would just be waiting for their moment to hit the mute button, or the gains, at exactly the right time. The desk was a bit old and knackered, so sometimes it would click. When that happened you just had to start again and do it again without the click. It was a bit of a mental process to be honest.

GERALD SIMPSON

After I’d done my arrangements, Lee would spend ages really cleaning all the sounds up. There was no sound out of place. Because I had layers of bass going on, we managed to almost create a 3D effect with the SH-101 sounds. Because we had different types of reverb on each bass part, that made it feel almost metallic – a steel drum kind of sound.

ANIFF AKINOLA

From quite early on I knew we had something special on our hands. We got a few hundred white labels pressed up. In those days there was a pecking order, and you had to make sure certain DJs were sorted out first, otherwise you’d not be able to show your face in their clubs or record shops.

ANIFF AKINOLA

Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft and Stu Allan were the first to get it, because they were radio DJs, then the guys at Spin Inn. I think I gave Mike Pickering his copy. It ended up getting hammered at the Hacienda, not just by Mike, but also my friend Hewan who was a DJ there. He was our “barometer” – he was very discerning, and straight away he said he loved it.

COLIN THORPE

We’d had a series of failures with him, so this was quite a surprise.

ANIFF AKINOLA

I knew he wouldn’t bullshit me. He was no “yes man.”

COLIN THORPE

The record did take quite a while to really become a hit. There was a long gestation period.

ANIFF AKINOLA

Quite a few working DJs from both sides of the Pennines would have got their copies quite early on from Spin Inn, around the autumn of 1988.

GERALD SIMPSON

The very first pressing, we did 500 and it sold out straight away, so they went straight to re-press. I don’t think they’d done that at Rham! before. They were really excited.

COLIN THORPE

The person who really got behind it was John Peel. It got someone like that, from outside of the house scene, to make it a hit. He got Gerald to do a live session on his show in October 1989. We were able to do that because of Gerald’s set up. He could get all his machines to talk and actually play live.

ANIFF AKINOLA

We did a lot of live gigs with Gerald on the back of the record. It used to be Gerald, Colin, Nicola the singer and me. Us, and all of the equipment, could just about fit into Colin’s FIAT Uno.

COLIN THORPE

Eventually, in 1989, when “Voodoo Ray” went into the top 20, there was one day when it sold something like 120,000 copies in 12 hours. I think Gerald expected to get paid straight away, but that’s not how it works unfortunately. Rham! then had problems with their distributor going down.

GERALD SIMPSON

I didn’t even get a gold disc. I should have done.

ANIFF AKINOLA

A lot of people say that “Voodoo Ray” was uniquely British sounding. It doesn’t sound like it comes from Detroit or Chicago, but it doesn’t really sound like it comes from the UK, either. When I hear the bassline, it makes me think of old Fela Kuti records.

COLIN THORPE

It does sound a little like it was played on a thumb piano.

ANIFF AKINOLA

It was alien to the Americans, and it was alien to everyone else in the UK. That’s testament to Gerald. He’d layer things up, and was almost able to make the 303 speak. It was almost like you were party to a conversation between two machines on acid.

DJ PARROT

“Voodoo Ray” fit with the American stuff that we were playing at Jive Turkey, but also sounded different. It sounded like it was made by people like us. You could hear that in the sonics and the way they were put together.

WINSTON HAZEL

“Voodoo Ray” doesn’t sound like it’s from anywhere in particular, though it sounds like it could have come from Sheffield, more than it sounds like it comes from Manchester. The foot workers would go crazy when we put it on.

GERALD SIMPSON

My main focus when I was making it was the dancers. I had this Manchester crew called Foot Patrol in mind. It was those really fast foot movements that I was trying to make music for.

DJ PARROT

By the time “Voodoo Ray” came out, Manchester was changing from what it had been. The DJs there were really into all the pianos and quite ravey European stuff. Whereas on our side of the Pennines, maybe because we were a bit behind, there was still that core of dancers around who went back through electro to jazz funk, like Gerald.

KEVIN “BOY WONDER” HARPER

One day, while George was out in town or something, I started playing around with this drum machine we’d borrowed, and our SH-101 keyboard. I had “Voodoo Ray” on the turntable and the SH-101 on the go, and I was trying to tweak the sound of what I was playing so it would sound like the A Guy Called Gerald record.

GEORGE “E.A.S.E” EVELYN

When we got in the studio we sampled up “Voodoo Ray.” If you listen to the first version of “Dextrous” that we put out ourselves on Poverty Records, it’s got a bit of the vocal in it.

KEVIN “BOY WONDER” HARPER

A Guy Called Gerald inspired us, and then what everyone else was doing also provided inspiration – not just for us, but to LFO, Unique 3 and so on. At the same time, each individual musician or set of musicians were doing their own thing, and had different ideas about how to make a tune to the next person in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester or wherever.