There must have been something in the water, or perhaps some other kinds of substances, up in the West Midlands. It’s a part of the country that embraced the hardcore scene, inspiring many to not only go out and rave at the weekend, but also start making tentative steps into producing their own records. Nathan Jay AKA Ova Doce is one of these future visionaries and like all of the artists on Vinyl Fanatiks, has his own story of how he got to self-release his own hardcore record back in 1992.

We catch up on the phone though this isn’t the first time myself and Nathan have chatted, as this project has been bubbling in the background for the past 9 months. There has been a lot of conversations over that time as we worked out which tracks should be reborn – more of that to come.

Nathan first got into music around 1987/1988 when he bought a Casio SK1 and started messing about on it. A couple of years later in 1990 he bought himself a Fostex X30 4 Track and actually started to make tracks, Acid House tracks to be precise, though he adds “If you heard some of them you wouldn’t want to hear more than 4 seconds!” It wasn’t till 1991 when his mate Jez Allen Smith bought himself an Amiga and together the two of them formed Pennywise **The Profit, an early hardcore duo, creating bedroom demos and learning their trade and the limitations of an Amiga, when he started to make progress. By 1992 the band had disbanded and the Amiga was now on a two week rota with Jez having it for two weeks and Nathan for the following two weeks; this arrangement went on throughout 1992 until 1995.