DAVE PEARCE

To most UK clubbers, Dave Pearce is simply ‘that bloke on Radio 1’, ‘the guy who plays all the big choons’. London clubbers know him better, because he’s long been a voice of dance music on the capital’s airwaves. But few people are aware of quite how much of a history Dave Pearce has and just how he made it to presenting the second most popular specialist music show on Radio 1.

Dave Pearce is the only DJ on these pages who hasn’t come up through the club scene - he’s always been a radio man, right from the beginning of his career. More over, he’s always been in the dance and soul/funk/hip-hop camp and professes to hate rock music even today. He was turned on to black music as a schoolkid and he’s never looked back.

Inspired by soul DJs like Robbie Vincent on Radio London and Greg Edwards on Capital, Dave and his friends (amongst them Eugene Perrera, later co-founder of Kiss) set up a pirate radio station - Radio Jackie – while still at school.

With only this limited amount of experience behind him, Dave badgered Radio London until they took him on. He served an apprenticeship reading the news and weather, then persuaded the management to allow him to make a documentary about Marvin Gaye. This led to a regular Thursday night show, The Funk Fantasy, on which Dave showcased the garage and disco coming out of New York’s club scene. He began making regular trips to New York to source records and visited the legendary clubs of the day like the Paradise Garage and Area. Eventually he began recording shows at NYC station WBLS for broadcast back in London.

Dave also maintained a strong interest in the burgeoning hip-hop scene and regularly dropped in on recordings of Mr Magic’s influential rap show on WBLS, rubbing shoulders with the cream of the hip-hop fraternity and making many crucial contacts. Back in the UK, he persuaded Radio London to let him front a second show, A Fresh Start To The Week, to cater to this new sound. The first of its kind in the UK, it quickly became one of the station’s top-rated shows.

After helping set up the massive UK Fresh concert at Wembley Stadium and compiling the Hip-Hop 20 album for London's Streetsounds label, Dave persuaded the BBC to make a film about militant rap group Public Enemy, who at the time had released just one single. When Public Enemy arrived in London for their first UK show, Dave was brought in to MC the event. He gave a cassette copy of the gig to PE frontman Chuck D, which Chuck promptly sampled as links on the group's landmark second album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.

Pearce's relationship with the BBC continued and he worked on Behind The Beat, the first ever dance music TV programme in the UK. At the same time, he persuaded Radio London to set up a late night alternative service called Nite FM and brought in Pete Tong and Giles Peterson to present the other shows.

When Radio London closed, Dave moved to Capital under the guidance of Matthew Bannister, the future controller of Radio 1 and the man responsible for revamping the station's fuddy-duddy image in the nineties. With acid house beginning to blow up in the UK, he was quick to feature this new sound on his show. He also took over A&R at Polydor for their Urban records label and masterminded the crucial Urban Acid compilation that helped spread this new sound beyond the clubs and M25 raves.

When Kiss finally acquired a legal broadcast licence, Dave took the Drivetime show chair, but soon moved into the prestigious Breakfast Show slot. Dave also ran the popular Kiss At The Astoria club night on Thursdays and continued his transatlantic mic-hopping by regularly hosting shows from New York's Hot 97 station for broadcast on Kiss.

In 1995, with Matthew Bannister now installed as controller, Radio 1 came calling and Dave reluctantly left Kiss to take over the early morning Radio 1 spot from Bruno Brookes - something he describes as the most "gut-wrenching" decision he'd ever had to make - and soon became the regular stand-in for Chris Evans on the Breakfast Show.

Dave was soon promoted to weekend mornings and also launched The Recovery Session on Sunday afternoons, a kind of Breakfast Show for clubbers and a whole new concept for Radio 1 at the time. When Chris Evans left Radio 1 under a cloud, Dave took over the weekend Breakfast Show slots and was given his own After Hours dance music show on Thursday nights.

Following a series of successful live After Hours beach party broadcasts from around the UK and Ibiza, Dave moved to the prime Sunday evening spot straight after the Top 40, presenting a new show, Dance Anthems, and took over the weekday 6-8pm Drivetime show, both spaces he still occupies today. He also began writing The Sun’s weekly Dance Bizarre column and released the first of four compilation albums which have so far sold over 200,000 copies in total. To ca