It’s been a long time coming, but Join The Future, my long promised book on bleep techno and the early days of British bass music, will be published later this year. A couple of months ago I signed a deal with Velocity Press – a new publisher specialising in titles about electronic music and club culture helmed by former Knowledge magazine founder Colin Steven – which will see the book appear on stores on 2 December 2019.

As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been working on Join The Future for a number of years, spending much of my spare time tracking down and talking to original producers, DJs, dancers, journalists and label owners in order to find out all I can about how the bleep and bass sound developed, the role played by the club and dub soundsystem scenes in the North of England and how the sound helped to lay the foundations for the explosion in “bass music” – think hardcore, jungle, UK garage, dubstep, bassline and grime – in the years that followed.

Along the way I’ve found unsung heroes, little-known pioneers and details of influential but unknown people who can genuinely lay claim to have kick-started Britain’s Balearic and Acid House obsessions a year earlier than those in London began to cotton on. It’s been a lot of work, of course, but a real eye-opener. The resultant book you get to read will genuinely offer a new perspective on the early years of acid house and dance music culture in the UK and bust a few of the myths that have shaped the narrative over the last few decades.

If you head over to the Velocity Press website you can read an article I wrote explaining the story behind the book and my journey up until this point. You can also pre-order the book to ensure you have it before anyone else. If you’re on Twitter, you can also follow my new account dedicated to the book and various offshoot projects that you’ll be able to read about very soon.

At this point I’d like to put on record my thanks to Colin Steven for his belief in the book and willingness to take a chance on snapping it up. He’s very enthusiastic about the project and what I’m trying to achieve, which is all you can ask for as a writer.