Interview by Hogey Bare and Pete Griffiths

When we caught up with the Hooligans (Terry & Matt), we were all very busy, and in the end we decided to do the interview over the Web and the phone.

Q: Tell us a bit about you guys and how you both started recording together.

A: We both come from pretty different musical disciplines. Matt has been making music since the early '90s, while I come from an almost strictly DJ background. I used to enter small DJ battles all over the country; I won a few, got cold buckets of defeat thrown over me at others.

I had a few different college radio shows. I used to play 100% hip-hop and just cut it up. I was a pure B-Boy, rucksack full of markers, just tagging everything I could find. Then I started getting into production and making hip-hop tracks for my MC to rhyme over. That pretty much takes you up to the time when I first met Matt.

Matt has made music under a lot of different aliases, and has basically lived in the studio for the last 10 years. It's still quite hard to get him out of there. We hooked up about 5 years ago when Matt and another guy called James were making music under the name of Subsonic. They needed someone to come and scratch with their live set, so a mutual friend of James and me got us together.

We played our first gig together at a bar underneath Bagley's in King's Cross [London]. It was so hectic, we hadn't done any rehearsals and I had no idea when what I was doing, it ended up that Matt and James were screaming "TELL, SCRATCH NOW" over the music. We ended up blowing the system half way through the set. I have no idea how they got it back going but we did the second half about an hour later. Also that night, a friend of ours was breakdancing and his shoe flew off while doing a windmill and hit one of the punters in the mouth. It's safe to say we weren't asked back.

But from then on we worked on our sound and live set. Atomic Hooligan was born. Its funny, we did the London live band circuit and just used to take the studio to these real smokey little venues that you would usually find Nirvana cover bands at. We would walk into these places with all this hardware and turntables and you could see the sound engineer's head drop as he thought to himself "bollocks". About a year after all that, James left the group to concentrate on his design, so we took a break for a month or so. While we were on hiatus, Matt was listening to a lot of different stuff and came up with "Servin It Up". The rest is history.

Q: Where did the name come from? Where you both part of some street gang?

A: Matt needs to see an actual real street, outside of the studio, in the real world, before he could even consider being in a street gang. Matt has a proper '70s Afro. If he put a bandana headband 'round it and wore a leather waistcoat with tassels and flared jeans, he would look like a character from the film 'Warriors'. In photos I look like Ray Winston, so I suppose I could be an East End gangster. Only problem is, we are both complete pussies, so we wouldn't make very good gang members.

Atomic Hooligan just comes from us having a laugh, trying to think of something to call ourselves. We have been through lots of names. At one time we were called Mud Skipper for f*ck sake. There's no deep meaning to it. I wish there were, but sorry, that's about as interesting as it gets.

Q: How did you come about releasing your stuff on Botchit Breaks?

A: Jason Sparks was a friend of the crew and he came to us to help him with a DJ mix that Annie Nightingale from [BBC] Radio 1 had asked him to do for her show. We were very pleased to do it. So when Matt had done "Servin It Up" as a favor, Jason took it to Vini [Medley]. Vini liked it and got back to us, simple as that really. We had interest from a few of the other labels, but we loved Botchit stuff and it seemed like the right thing to do and it still does. I don't think you could find a better, more dedicated set of people; they really did integrate us as part of the family from pretty much day one. Sonia's like our surrogate mum. Every time we go in to Botchit HQ she tucks our shirts in for us and spits on her hanky and cleans our faces.

Q: Where do you see the future of nu skool breaks going?

A: In a few years I see it becoming old skool! Only kidding. I don't think we do or have ever really seen our selves as nu skool artists, I don't think most producers do. I think the nu skool thing is more of a media term, used to kind of pigeonhole what a group of people are doing. Which isn't a bad thing, you have to give everything a name. In terms of what's happening now, I think there are a lot of talented people making really amazing music. The thing with the scene at the moment is there isn't one defining all-encompassing sound. I love this ethos, it give DJs and producers so much freedom. But all you need is one track to blow up big and every one and their mothers to say, "Right, I'm making a bassline like that". But so far that hasn't really happened. Everyone's just doing his or her own thing. And even if you don't necessarily like the next man's stuff, you have to give props to the diversity and if you don't feel the same way I politely urge you to f*ck off. There are a lot of people working their arses of for little to no reward to bring us this art just because they believe in what they are doing. I see breaks blowing up. We are all doing the groundwork now and learning from mistakes made in the past, it might take another 10 years but it's nothing but positive.