The DJ and A&R executive Pete Tong became a friend.

He'd started a studio, kind of created this studio in West London called Gorilla Studios, from where the Gorilla record label started.

You know, after the kind of rave era and the start of the kind of UK club scene in, in the early nineties, when kind of every town and city within a few years of the early nineties seemed to have a specialist club.

The music that Gorilla started putting out was really kind of seminal, and, and I was, I was kind of hammering it.

A lot of the DJs up and coming at that time, like Sasha w- and John Digweed were playing, um, the music coming out on William's labels.

His version of Barber's Adagio for Strings became a huge hit.

Like, kind of obvious in a way, but, you know, what happens with classical music is obviously these amazing compos- compositions get reinterpreted over, you know, hundreds of years, um, by different orchestras and, and conductors, and effectively that's what he did.

Instead of, you know, concentrating on one composer, he picked his favorites and, um, reinterpreted them with his kind of electronic genius.

And for Pete Tong, it's now claimed its place in music history, and new bands can still learn from what London pioneered 40 years ago, I think.

Over my career, over my, my life, I've read an awful lot of music books, and I was too young to be around, you know, I wasn't around in the '60s or '70s for the kind of, you know, the Berry Gordy era at Motown or the, um, you know, Jerry Wexler at Atlantic.

But I kind of studied those people, and, and I kind of studied what Chris Blackwell had been doing in the early years.

And, and I think Roger and Tracy still had a little bit of a connection with, with the generation before, you know, not necessarily Motown as such, but they were very hands-on in terms of the A&R process and totally different actually.

But together they were so good, and I think I'd like to think I took, you know, 50% from Roger and 50% from Tracy to go into kind of the m- the makeup of, of the w- the way I ended up.

So, um, it was, it was a real, it was a real process, you know.

We were just in the middle of this kind of whirlwind, kind of hurricane of activity, and it was a really, really exciting time.

It was a decade-long quest to define the dance from the rave of Orbital to the hip hop of Cookie Crew, to drum and bass don Clifford Price, AKA Goldie himself.

Idealistically in 1983, we wanted a record label that could have Rocker's Revenge Walking on Sunshine, but could have, you know, the Fine Young Cannibals.

It could have the Cane Gang, it could have Carmel, and it could have, you know, dance records that I was, I'd started to pick up, particularly from America.

So it was like having these acts that we were going to, um, still be talking about in 20 or 30 years' time.

By the mid-'90s, I was obsessed.

That's what I was really looking for.

That's what I went into work for every day.

I put the cassette on the desk and said, "Are you gonna sign that record?"

One nascent staffer was a young writer and DJ who would be pivotal to London Records and the UK music scene over the next four decades.

Hi, I'm Pete Tong, and I joined London Records in 1983.

We were just in the middle of this kind of whirlwind, kind of hurricane of activity, and it was a really, really exciting time.

So it was just very, very exciting.

I mean, there, there I am, like, first day at the office and we have a number one record.

In fact, I remember they handed me a great big stack of half-inch reels of tape and they said [laughs], "Oh, you're a DJ.

You know, go and edit the next single, the follow-up to Candy Girl from New Edition." And I was like, with the tapes in my hands like, "Uh, yeah, okay.

Pete Tong.